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PHP

Jonathan Grieve
MOD
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

What can anyone tell me about Laravel?

I'm thinking about what's next for me on my Treehouse Journey as I'm almost finished the Treehouse Wordpress Development Track. Obviously I need to keep my skills fresh on that but I was looking at good PHP courses in the library.

I know that the PHP offerings are being updated at the moment under Alena's excellent (I'm sure :) ) teaching and I wondered about Laravel and possibly Drupal?

Is it worth me taking the time to get to know this? Will it help me for example make better websites? :)

Jeffrey Davidson
Jeffrey Davidson
26,147 Points

I say always expand your knowledge on as much as you are willing to learn. Keep in mind there's two types of developers/designers out there. Specialists (those who master one or two topics) and generalists (those who have a working knowledge on many topics). Figure out what category suits you best.

As far as Laravel it is a framework of PHP so needing to understand how PHP works would be a great first step before diving into Laravel because it will help you understand how the framework works.

I can't say anything for Drupal just because I don't have any knowledge on it so I'll leave that to someone who can better further assist.

Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

Thanks Jeffrey,

So in your experience, is it going to set me back, getting into it in version 4 wheras current version going from memory is 5.3? :)

Jeffrey Davidson
Jeffrey Davidson
26,147 Points

Yes I would strongly advise that you don't work with version 4. There are quite a few differences in how the framework runs and even the folder structure got a big change. If you have any questions on the framework you can contact me and I'd be more than happy to answer them to the best of my ability or help find you the answer.

2 Answers

The course on Tree house is a bit old Jonathan , learning Laravel 4 is not a good idea , since some of the changes that have been introduced in the newer version of Laravel are treated differently in Laravel 4 for instance. Controllers, Middleware, and Requests (a new type of class in Laravel 5.0) are now grouped under the app/Http directory which are treated differently in 4 . I would encourage you to gain some knowledge about php frameworks which use MVC architecture just to know how they work and then jump into laravel later .

Dekel Zoaretz
Dekel Zoaretz
14,864 Points

There is a great project here in treehouse about Laravel, take a look :)

Jonathan Grieve
Jonathan Grieve
Treehouse Moderator 91,253 Points

Hi Dekel,

I'm aware of the Treehouse courses available on Laravel but it's the time difference between the courses available and how far Laravel has moved on since then that I was wondering about. It might be a little while, if at all before I dip in. :-)